The letter is based on a glyph of the Proto-Sinaitic script, probably called dalt'door' (door in Modern Hebrew is delet), ultimately based on a hieroglyph depicting a door:
The original sound value is a voiceless bilabial plosive/p/ and it retains this value in most Semitic languages, except for Arabic, where the sound /p/ changed into the voiceless labiodental fricative/f/, carrying with it the pronunciation of the letter. However, the sound /p/ in Arabic is used in loanwords with the letter pe as an alternative. Under the Persian influence, many Arabic dialects in the Persian Gulf, as well as in Egypt and in some of the Maghreb under the Ottoman influence uses the letter pe to represent the sound /p/ which is missing in Modern Standard Arabic. Not to be confused with the Turned g. The Phoenician letter gave rise to the GreekPi (Π), LatinP, GlagoliticⰒ, and CyrillicП.
It represents the consonant [w] in classical Hebrew, and [v] in modern Hebrew, as well as the vowels [u] and [o]. In text with niqqud, a dot is added to the left or on top of the letter to indicate, respectively, the two vowel pronunciations.